Kathleen Wynne is a radical leftist who wants to tear down the things that made Ontario, Canada and the West great, University of Toronto psychologist Jordan Peterson told a crowd assembled by Tory MPP Randy Hillier in Carleton Place on Thursday night.

“If she had a shred of integrity, she’d resign,” Peterson said to applause, from a riser in a corner of a second-floor ballroom at the town arena.

“See if you can take the social-justice warriors out at the top,” he advised.

Young people could and should be energized into conservative activism by the promise of completely wiping out the Ontario Liberal Party, he said. There should be not one Liberal MPP left after the next election.

Hillier, who represents Lanark-Frontenac-Lennox and Addington, had billed Peterson’s talk as non-political, focused on the importance of civic engagement. It … wasn’t.

If you look around the world at the state of governance in most places … the most pathological and vicious thugs rule

Peterson alternated between advocating some genuinely appealing conservative ideas and raging against straw-man versions of conservatives’ political opponents:

Wynne is a radical leftist who’d have been a pariah even within the New Democratic Party 20 or 30 years ago. Humanities programs at universities are “corrupt”, and universities as a whole have lost their way, turning out “cringing milksops” who see themselves as victims. “Unconscious bias” is made up and benefiting from unearned privilege isn’t really a thing. We are almost at the mercy of social-justice warriors who hate the West.

Canada “is not the same country it was 10 years ago. We need to wake up and stop this from happening,” Peterson spat.

The crowd loved it. They were a couple of hundred people. I saw one Asian woman; everyone else was white (this was Carleton Place, after all). The gender mix was roughly even, and there were more young people than you typically see at a conservative event.

Peterson is a respected psychology professor whose research is often cited by his peers. But he rocketed to fame outside academia last fall when he made a fuss over not using non-standard pronouns to refer to trans people.

Thursday night, he offered the 100 or so people in the hall a list of suggestions for selling conservatism to young voters. Besides razing the Liberal party, they included being unapologetically in favour of Western values and individual freedom, recognizing that responsibilities are more important than rights, promoting traditional nuclear families, and championing “hierarchies of competence” that reward people for their work.

Which, OK, right? More or less? But here’s how quickly a plausible idea could turn:

“If you look around the world at the state of governance in most places … the most pathological and vicious thugs rule,” Peterson said. “We actually value the individual right? The individual has intrinsic value in Western societies. You know how long it took? We don’t want to abandon that for some halfwitted collectivism, which we’re doing as fast as possible.”

Peterson is a tenured prof at a major university who took a tough public stand against political correctness (or, if you prefer, decency), and the results were predictable.

The left, including many of Peterson’s fellow academics, recoiled, and the right went bananas. Some people simply won’t talk to him now; others are kicking in monthly donations to his crowdfunding account, ostensibly in support of lectures Peterson puts on YouTube, to the tune of $45,000 a month.

The lectures, some of which are written for YouTube and some of which are clips from classes and public appearances, range far beyond psychology, into political science, philosophy, sociology, economics, literary criticism. Peterson made $175,000 as a psych prof last year but now he’s on pace to bring in $540,000 a year in donations alone. The man’s a star.

Peterson is a pharmacist who dispenses red pills — a meme from a pivotal moment in the Matrix movies, when Keanu Reeves’ character has to choose between staying in his happy hallucination by taking a blue pill or confronting the ugly truth by taking a red one.

One of hard-edged conservatism’s rhetorical tricks is to talk about moderate mainstream liberalism as if it’s loony left-wing extremism; Peterson does that. He pathologizes that alleged extremism (and right-wing extremism, though because it’s lefties who are in charge they’re the ones you need to worry about). People aren’t liberals just because they have different values or life experiences, but because they have disordered minds.

(Which, to be fair, if you spend much of your life as a psychologist on a university campus, is an opinion you might come by honestly.)

But do you engage with delusional people, take their political views seriously? Of course you don’t. As political actors, they aren’t real in the same way you are. Peterson said several times on Thursday night that a healthy society needs debate, including between right and left. But it’s hard to say what legitimate leftism might look like, in a Petersonian world.

None of this is to say he’s wrong about everything, just to explain why he’s so beloved by a certain segment of our polity. Talk-radio populism with an intellectual wrapper, where the other side isn’t just wrong but sick and evil, sells.

Does it win elections? It has in the United States. There were over 200 people delivering a standing ovation for Peterson in a hall in Carleton Place who seem to think it could here, too.